With the advent of the internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) there is an increase in the accessibility to and provision of, on-line services. In the field of printing services, for example, there exists entities offering printing services, for example the known www.mediaflex.com. A print service provider (PSP) may offer a range of printing services. A customer requiring a print service is likely to be faced with the task of finding a suitable print service provider who can provide the required printing services at an affordable cost in reasonable time.
Prior art approaches are known in which a customer may place an order over an internet connection to an appropriately configured interactive website owned by a print service provider and whereafter the print service provider utilizes human resources to complete a given order request. Human interaction in this way may lead to delays in that a customer order may be held up in view of a print service provider being saturated with orders. A human operator may be required to make complex decisions based on availability of a given print service provider, timing requirements of a given customer, costs associated with the particular printing job received, whether or not the print service provider can in fact produce the required goods and so on. The problem is compounded further in that a print service provider entity may become under utilized or over-utilized which may present problems to the smooth provision of printing services.
There is a need for an improved method and associated apparatus for allocating print service orders to service providers over an electronic network. In particular, there is a need for providing reasonably fast responses to customer orders made over an electronic network such that such orders are dealt with in as near to real time as possible. There is a need for increasing the speed of transactions so that the capacities of service providers are utilized as efficiently as possible whilst maintaining reasonable costs over a prolonged period of time. On a wider scale there is a need for an improved customer ordering scenario over an electronic network wherein a given customer's requirements are satisfied as soon as possible and managed over time such that a wider variety of specialized and non-specialized services exist with associated costs of such services remaining fairly constant.
Services such as print on demand services via the internet generally fall into two groups as follows:                Open print on demand services. In this group, PSP's compete for the assignment of an order. The PSP who makes the best bid will serve the printing order. This system tends to benefit customers rather than PSP's. PSP's with expensive bids will tend to be subject to receiving less and less jobs although the price difference, as compared with other PSP's, may not be too large.        Closed print on demand services. In this group, the Print on Demand service tries to distribute equally the printing orders amongst all the PSP's. It tends to benefit PSP's rather than customers because it assigns orders to PSP's not taking into account final price.        
It is known that existing prior art service provision demand services working in the internet arena generally form into one of the above identified two categories. This, therefore invariably leads to the problem of a given customer or a given PSP being favoured against another. Moreover, some of the solutions do not implement the concept of a distributed printing warehouse comprising a plurality of print service providers distributed over a given geographical region. Existing print on demand services may also be limited in that they may be concentrated in a centralised print centre which as described above leads to a penalty of increased shipping costs for customer orders placed by customers who are located geographically substantially distant from the print centre. For example, if a print centre is based in the United Kingdom then Spanish end customers will be subject to pay international delivery fares as compared with UK based customers.
Prior art known to the inventors of the present invention is that described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,995,721 published on Nov. 30, 1999. This prior art distributed printing system described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,995,721 offers, an improved automated procedure for providing printing services to given customer orders, but is complex in that it is required to sub-divide a given customer order (or job) into a plurality of job portions which may be delivered to one or more queues. This approach has various problems including an increase in the likelihood of orders being mixed up in view of job apportionment to different printing units within a given print centre.
As an overall improvement to current print on demand services there is a need for increased automation of allocation of print orders to print service providers.
For the reasons discussed above there is a need to bring together the best of the two types of known on-line print service provision. In other words, there is the need to minimize customer cost whilst ensuring that a PSP with competitive prices does not find itself in a position with no orders. In addition, there is a need to distribute orders for printing services on a more global level. Local print service providers do not always provide a best cost to local customers, even when taking into account shipping costs. Thus, geographical criteria are required to be taken into account in terms of minimizing final price of a given order.